Obama Won’t Bar Inquiry, or Penalty, on Interrogations

A section of the detention camp at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, seen on a tour in October 2007.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Obama left the door open Tuesday to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and did not rule out action by the Justice Department against those who fashioned the legal rationale for those techniques.

The remarks, in response to questions from reporters in the Oval Office, amounted to a shift for the White House. The president had repeatedly said that the nation should look forward rather than focusing on the past, and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said Sunday in a television interview that Mr. Obama believed that “those who devised policy” should not be prosecuted.

But under intense pressure from Democrats on Capitol Hill and human rights organizations to investigate, the president suggested Tuesday that he would not stand in the way of a full inquiry into what he has called “a dark and painful chapter” in the nation’s history.

Mr. Obama said he was “not suggesting” that a commission be established. But he also sketched out the parameters for a panel that would look much like the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that “if and when there needs to be a further accounting,” he hoped Congress would examine ways for it to be conducted in a bipartisan fashion. Some Democrats are pushing similar proposals on Capitol Hill.

The president restated his opposition to prosecuting C.I.A. operatives who followed the Bush administration’s legal guidelines in conducting interrogations. But as for lawyers or others who drew up the policies allowing techniques he has banned, Mr. Obama said it would be up to his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide what to do.

The comments knocked the ordinarily smooth White House press operation back on its heels. Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, spent much of his daily briefing on Tuesday being peppered with questions about precisely what Mr. Obama had meant, declaring at one point, “To clear up any confusion on anything that might have been said, I would point you to what the president said.”

The White House’s shifting comments in recent days provide a glimpse into its struggle to deal with one of the thorniest issues Mr. Obama has faced since taking office. That issue has turned all the more prickly for him since his decision to release previously secret memorandums detailing the harsh tactics used by the C.I.A. under President George W. Bush — memos revealing that, for instance, two captured operatives of Al Qaeda were subjected a total of 266 times to a form of near drowning known as waterboarding.

In an indication of the crosscurrents the president has faced in dealing with the issue, his own national intelligence director said in an internal memo last week that the now-banned interrogation methods had produced valuable information, contrary to the White House view that they had not been effective.

“High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country,” Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote to his staff last Thursday as the previously secret memos were released.

A condensed version of the Blair memo was distributed to news organizations that day without that sentence. The original memo was provided to The New York Times on Tuesday by a critic of Mr. Obama’s policy. Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Blair, said Tuesday that the sentence had been dropped in a routine process of shortening an internal memo into a statement for the news media.

Responding to a query about the fuller memo, Mr. Blair issued a statement Tuesday evening underscoring his support for the president’s release of the previously secret documents and for Mr. Obama’s decision to ban the “enhanced interrogation techniques” at issue.

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“We do not need these techniques to keep America safe,” said Mr. Blair, who added: “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us, and they are not essential to our national security.”

Bush administration veterans, starting with former Vice President Dick Cheney, have argued that the harsh methods helped prevent terrorist attacks. In an interview Monday on Fox News, Mr. Cheney called for the Obama White House to release additional memos that he said showed that the techniques were useful.

“There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity,” he said. “They have not been declassified.”

Some human-rights advocates interpreted Mr. Obama’s remarks on Monday as an invitation for them to step up pressure on the White House for the president to create a 9/11-style bipartisan commission on his own. They said they had pushed that idea with senior White House officials, although Mr. Obama has not committed to it, either in public or, they said, in private.

On Capitol Hill, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, has proposed a “truth commission,” an idea endorsed by some other Democrats.

But Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he feared a Congressional inquiry would turn partisan and divide the country. “I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively,” he said, “and that it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations.” He said he would prefer an inquiry “outside of the typical hearing process,” with “independent participants who are above reproach and have credibility.”

Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First, an advocacy group here, said Mr. Obama was using the same language her organization had used in trying to persuade the White House that he should create a commission. “Those criteria that he outlined,” she said, “those are the exact same things we’ve been saying to them.”

The debate promises only to escalate in the days ahead. The three Bush administration lawyers who signed the interrogation memos — John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury — are the subject of a coming report by the Justice Department’s ethics office that officials say is very critical of their work. The office has the power to recommend disbarment or other professional penalties or, less likely, to refer cases for criminal prosecution.

Mr. Obama was not specific in discussing what course of action, if any, the attorney general might take, saying only, “I think that there are a host of very complicated issues here.”

Peter Baker contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Won’t Bar Inquiry, or Penalty, on Interrogations. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe